Customer Reviews

The Coroner's Lunch

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Colin Cotterill's "The Coroner's Lunch" proved to be a gem of a find and a treat of a read. It's a bit hard to classify this book because while it deals with serious themes of murder and corruption, it is also written in almost light hearted and witty manner, full of irreverent humour, and with a slight mystical overtone. But once you start "The Coroner's Lunch," it is really hard to put this book down: swiftly paced with a few disparate subplots that seem unconnected, "The Coroner's Lunch" was completely unputdownble.

Set in Laos (once part of Indochine) and in 1975, "The Coroner's Lunch" follows the fortunes of Dr. Siri Paiboum, a Paris trained doctor, who joined the communist party and who has been fighting with them in the jungle, for the sake of the love of his life, his wife Boua. When the novel opens, the fight is over, the communists have won and Siri is now a 70-something year old widower, who is entertaining hopes of a well deserved retirement. Of course things don't go according to plan: because of a lack of trained professionals (most seemed to have fled the country), Siri is informed that he is now the state's only coroner even though he knows next to nothing about performing autopsies. Knowing that declining the privilege is not an option, our reluctant coroner soon finds himself fitted up less than properly equipped morgue and the help of one nurse, Dtui (who is fortunately quite intelligent) and an amiable man of all jobs, Geung, who has Down's Syndrome. Together all three seem to shuffle along adequately and happily. That is until the wife of an important official turns up dead at the morgue. The husband claims that his wife probably died of food poisoning (she liked eating raw fish), but something about the lady's death troubles Siri -- the rush to pronounce her death an accidental one, and the claiming of her body before a proper autopsy can be performed, together with Siri's vision of the dead woman's spirit (yes, the doctor sees ghosts), convinces Siri that the lady was murdered. Siri is determined to discover who murdered the lady and why, but before he can get around to investigation further, he's called upon to perform another autopsy (this time one that could have serious international consequences), and then later to investigate a series of bizarre deaths up North. Suddenly it seems to be raining dead bodies -- or could someone be trying to keep Siri from further investigation the death of the important official's wife...

I've been rather lucky lately: nearly every book I've picked up to read, I've found to be well written, clever, witty and a really enjoyable read. In fact I'm beginning to wonder when this string of good luck will wear out! "The Coroner's Lunch" was one of my lucky finds. And I do hope that Kirkus review that claims this book to be the first in a series is right: I'm already counting the months to the next Dr. Siri installment. Simply everything pleased about this book: from the clever, mystical storyline; to the witty and humourous prose style; to the completely engaging and likable protagonist, Dr. Siri Paiboum. Brilliantly building on the suspense by mounting one subplot on top of the other, Colin Cotterill cleverly leads us deeper and deeper into the heart of the novel. So if you're looking for a completely absorbing, engrossing and engaging read, look no further: "The Coroner's Lunch" is it. One of the best reads of the year.

First of all, thanks to V.J.Canberra for recommending this historical/esoteric/ethnic series of crime novels around Dr.Siri.
Meet the hero: the man is 72 and reluctantly (he would rather retire) national chief coroner of the recently turned Republic of Laos under communist Pathet Lao rule. The time is 1976. Dr.Siri is insufficiently qualified as well as equipped and staffed. He makes that up by being the founding father of cynicism. He has odd green eyes. Dogs hate him (until a turnaround point in the plot when they begin to love him). His bosses are weary of his atttitude. Women seem to love him, but he has only recently begun to notice, his wife died 10 years ago. He has been a long time party member, but for the wrong reasons (chercher la femme! though Thai radio propaganda against the new regime claim that all Lao communists are ugly.) On top of all this, Siri is psychic. He sees dead people, "all the time". (saw that movie? it would help)
All Asian countries are heavily infested with ghosts and spirits. Probably the poorer, the more infested. As Siri is otherwise short of resources, he makes best use of his off-curriculum abilities (which actually go against his scientific mindset.)
The novel has three concurrent crime cases, which stretch poor Siri's skills to the limits.
First, a communist top cadre's wife has died under strange circumstances. While this case is the most normal of the three and easily seen through, it provides most of the suspense in this otherwise rather funny book.
Second, three shady Vietnamese turn up killed, which threatens to cause an international confrontation. Siri solves the case and saves peace, which however doesn't fully convince; it may not be fully thought through. Third, in an army project that wants to help minority people to substitute opium by other cash crops, the army commanders have been dying one after the other in strange circumstances. The story leads into realms of spirits that I am not familiar with and that make Siri become an unexpected exorcist's assistant.
I was considering to deduct a star for too much reliance on the other world and for a wobbly second case, but then, as I like the book a lot, I thought, what the heck. Go for it!

Really enjoyed this - thanks to the Shelfari community! This was recommended as I completed one of my reviews - just on the basis of other books I'd enjoyed. It's the first of a series (that I am really enjoying discovering!) dealing with the 70-year-old Lao coroner Dr Siri Paiboun, who - despite no training and little enthusiasm initially and paying scant respect to his new political masters (the Communist cadres control Laos) - does his job so well that he is difficult to replace. At 70, but still sprightly, he misses his wife, killed in the jungles by a grenade attack, but suspects she had fallen out of love with him, which makes his isolation worse, in some ways. In "The Coroner's Lunch", Siri suspects the that death of a wife of one of the Party leaders is not as innocent as it appears. Even though the equipment he has to investigate with is primitive, and the opposition to his investigation brutal, he perseveres ...
What makes his job both easier (in a weird sense) and harder is that Siri receives visits form the apirits of those he practises his coronial skills on. These both terrify him, and intesnify his need to find the truth - about himself, as well as the victims.
It's always great to find a new series to me, and I'm looking forward very much to tracking Dr Siri's story - a new old friend!

The CORONER'S LUNCH is an amazing debut novel, with a lot of promise for future fun (there's a sequel, called THIRTY-THREE TEETH that is darned good), but which delivers in the here-and-now too.

Any summary description of this book will seem a bit hokey. What we have here is more than the sum of its parts. Let's see: we have septugenarian national coroner Suri Paiboun, repentant Communist guerilla rebel, in Laos in the 1970s. He's busy solving several murders in the most Holmesian manner possible while simultaneously wrapped up in a thriller (I won't give any spoilers on that). Oh. And he's also the current incarnation of a thousand year old warrior monk. Sounds... well, tortured or corny. But somehow the writing is permeated by just the right tinge of local flavor and the magic doesn't overcome the realism.

A nice debut. There's some growing room for Cotterill, as you'd expect in a first novel. But still very nice.

I am married to a Lao woman, go to Vientiane frequently and plan to retire there. Cotterill captures the people and city that I have come to respect and enjoy. Lao is very different from Thailand. I admire them both. The Lao people have a different way about them that most Farang never see. Cotterill is able to put the sights, sounds and personalities of Vientiane into words that no one else can. As a mystery, "Lunch" is every bit the potboiler of vintage Hammett. He is to Lao, what Jake Needham is to Thailand. A few clever twists and engaging characters that keep you moving to the very last page. Well worth the price of admission.

In 1975 the Pathet Lao takes over Laos incorporating a communist bureaucracy centered from the capitol at Vientiane. Most of the country's intelligentsia fled but septuagenarian Paris trained physician Dr. Siri Paiboun remains behind expecting to gently retire. However, the new government names Siri state coroner. He deduces this was done because his superiors like Magistrate Haeng expect him to make no waves since he was the last breathing medical doctor still in country.

Though Comrade Haeng tortures Siri with his required "burden sharing tutorials" that questions the obvious, the doctor shockingly takes his job seriously seeking the truth even when the brass wants heart attack as cause of death regardless of reality. He upsets the party with his inquires into the death of Comrade Kham's wife as Haeng claims food poisoning. Siri further upsets the communist balance with his deeper look at the accidental deaths of three men who show signs of torture in spite of being food for fish. Finally the suicide of Mai seems a fake to hide homicide. As Haeng harangues, Siri sets things right.

Readers who enjoy mysteries in other lands will fully appreciate this delightful tale. The story line provides a deep look at Laos as the Communist Party transitions into power with Siri applying logic to solve cases that his by the book superior wants buried. With the help of dreams that enable the hero to humorously organize his cases, his life, and his society, Siri is a terrific protagonist. His wry comments and asides satirizes his plight as a not so indoctrinated Communist who joined five decades because of how a woman who became his wife breathed. THE CORONER'S LUNCH is a winner due to him.

Harriet Klausner

I find most "mystery" books boring, especially if you've read one of the authors' prior books (too formulaic). Exceptions include those which take a different perspective on things, such as Tony Hillerman's.

Likewise with geopolitical "thrillers," excepting those like LeCarre , who focus on the psychological aspects, when you realize the internal politics are more important than the international.

This book has it all: the internal politics, the unusual perspective (from a corner of Indochina), a quirky and humorous hero, brought along by very good plotting which keeps you engaged from start to finish.

My only quibble: a bit too much emphasis on the supernatural.

Unlike with most mysteries, I'm eagerly looking forward to reading the author's next book.

In Dr. Siri Paiboun, Colin Cotterill has created one of the most endearing, intelligent, charming and curious protagonists in modern mystery fiction. The elderly coroner, new to dissecting corpses AND communing with the spirits of said corpses, is so full of life and good humor that we are willing to follow him anywhere; and with author Colin Cotterill such a wonderful guide to the novel's setting -- Laos of the 1970s -- this is truly a unique and exotic journey.

In this first book of the Dr. Siri series, we meet the good coroner as he is in his first year as state coroner in Vientiane, the capital of the young communist country. He's a widower with almost half a century of jungle fighting under his belt, leading up to the revolution that displaced the corrupt monarchy and put the communists -- possibly just as corrupt as the banished royals -- in power. Before you start to think this is some kind of heavy political tome, however, know that Dr. Siri only became a rebel because he fell in love with a communist girl back in Paris when and where he was studying to achieve his medical degree. He's definitely got a laid-back attitude about politics now. He's not a cynic, but he's not under the illusion that the communists are holy saviors of the Lao people, either.

So there is a political element lending suspense and weight to the murders he investigates in this and the other books of the series. But there is so much humor and lightness and just a frankly uncommon warmth to how Cotterill treats the characters in these books -- from the overweight and intelligent nurse, Dtui, to Siri's Down Syndrome morgue assistant, Geung -- we come to really care about these characters. It makes other modern mystery fiction seem stark and cold by contrast. And it adds to the suspense tremendously when these characters are imperiled.

There are lovely elements of the mythic, mystic and the supernatural in here, too, and Cotterill integrates these flights of fancy (and fantasy) so seamlessly into the narrative that it adds layer upon fascinating layer to the unfolding yarns. Buddhism, shamanism, ancient curses, psychic visions ... all these are part of how Siri peels back the layers of the onion, solving mysteries and unraveling his own clairvoyant identity in the process.

Start this book and you'll never want it to end. Lucky for you, the other books in the series are just as excellent.

This was, unquestionably, the best mystery novel I read in 2004. It is thoroughly original and very enjoyable. Let us hope it is not the last from Colin Cotterill. In Dr. Siri Paiboun, he has created one of the most engaging sleuths to come along since Joe Leaphorn. The setting is exotic; Laos shortly after the Pathet Lao came to power in the mid 70's.

The elderly Paiborn has been "rewarded" for his decades of field service as a doctor caring for wounded revolutionaries in the nothern jungle by being made chief (and sole) coroner of Laos. Siri has no training or experience in forensic medicine. His autopsy lab has primitive equipment left behind by the French and no chemical supplies. His assistants are a man with Down's Syndrome and a nurse who spends her free time studying pop culture magazines. To complicate matters further, Siri has begun to see apparitions -- mostly of dead people.

Siri gets his first real challenge when the wife of a high party official is poisoned. As Siri wrestles with this and other problems, Cotterill treats the reader to a painless short course in the geography, culture, and political milieu of Laos at a turning point in its history.

I was really excited about this book at first. The setting -- Laos of the mid 1970s -- was different, exotic, and interesting. The author focused on the new influence of Communism on the characters, as well as the impact of American, Vietnamese, and Hmong cultures on the Lao people. I liked the protagonist Siri, as well as his motley group of unlikely cohorts at the coroner's office. Cotterill even took the daring step of integrating the supernatural into the storyline. For some, that might be off-putting, but I actually liked this part of the book. The real and surreal were nicely blended. There is definitely a lot to like about the book, and I am not entirely sure why I felt let down by it. I do not think it was the characterization (which was good), it was not the setting (which was excellent), it was not the writing (which was well done), and it was not the pacing (which kept me engaged most of the time). I guess that leaves only one thing: the plot itself was a little unsatisfying. It got too complicated at one point, and then came together too neatly. It just didn't seem as believable as it should have. I think that is my biggest problem with it. It is worth reading, and I would recommend it, perhaps just with some hesitation...